Rivet Logic Blogs

Tag: Crafter CMS

Your website isn’t just brochure-ware or a place where people go for product updates, but instead it’s the lifeblood of your company and acts as an important sales tool for that first initial interaction with your users. It’s also an engagement tool, with the ability to segment and build personas, to deliver personalized experiences that’ll keep your users engaged. From an integration standpoint, a web CMS isn’t just a standalone effort, but needs to integrate with various other tools such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics.

Crafter Cloud is a full featured, enterprise SaaS-based content management system with user-friendly authoring tools, easy integration, high-performance content delivery, ability for personalization and targeting, using a suite of industry-leading development tools to enable delivery of omni-channel experiences. Crafter was designed with flexibility and scale and can be integrated with a variety of digital efforts.

Why the Cloud? 5 Reasons to Move Your CMS to Crafter Cloud

From our experience implementing CMS solutions, we’ve across 5 consistent themes for why customers choose Crafter Cloud when deciding to move their CMS to the cloud.

Custom development experience in the cloud – One of the biggest benefits from both an IT and marketing perspective is the availability of a custom development experience, which provides the front-end team a personalized development environment with the ability to use any front end framework of their choice. This leads to shorter release cycles, which benefits business teams and keeps them excited about the CMS as new features and functionality requests are met in a timely manner.

Full Featured CMS – As a full-featured CMS, Crafter Cloud has the design, integration and security features of an enterprise CMS that’s traditionally deployed on-premise with your own resources. The cloud CMS is a great option for customers with a lot of security and integration requirements to deploy the system without a lot of IT overhead. In addition, one of the challenges businesses face during a rebranding effort or site redesign is the ability of the CMS to respond appropriately. Not only are there desktop views, we now need to accommodate multiple screens and mobile devices, and each experience needs to be unique. Design responsiveness and the ability to create custom design and not be limited by the CMS and its features is imperative.

Augment IT – Deploying your CMS in the cloud allows you to augment your IT and accelerate time-to-market. This means freeing up time and resources and limiting your IT overhead so they can focus on new features and the overall user experience.

Cost – Deploying your CMS in the cloud is also cost effective, with savings from resources, time and energy it would take to build and deploy the solution. Crafter Cloud employs a flexible pricing model that allows you to scale and buy as you grow, limiting any over buy.

Running your business at the speed of the market – Often times your public facing website becomes an afterthought if the CMS can’t keep up (e.g. the need for IT resources to make updates, design updates limited by features, marketing needs more data / analytics, etc.). Teams often end up walking away from relying on the CMS and addressing these tasks independently. Crafter keeps in pace with not just consumers but also the technology side of the house by allowing development teams to work with tools they’re familiar with.

Design & Deployment Considerations

When it comes to Web Experience Management (WEM), it can be broken into 5 categories, each with its own subcategories to dissect and think about your business and users (IT, marketing, sales, customers, partners, etc.).

Ease of use – Is it user friendly?

Multi-channel – What are your multi-channel requirements? It’s no longer enough to say it needs to work on a mobile device. Mobile is a whole different experience to think through, and you need to make sure your CMS can be responsive and flexible in that sense. For example, a mobile experience for retail is very different from a services company.

Personalization – Your site needs to be personalized to build engagement. A repeat consumer / site visitor doesn’t want to feel like they’re reintroducing themselves each time they visit your site, which can be very frustrating. You need a CMS that enables you to build the journey with the customer and not force a reintroduction at each touch point.

Engagement – A CMS becomes a viable piece of your business when it can spark engagement, which comes in many forms. Engagement isn’t only about results in product buying, but also in comments, reviews, and feedback loops.

Integration – Can it easily integrate with other third party systems – CRM, Marketing Automation, Analytics, etc.?

Who Are My Users and What Do They Need?

Users are typically divided between internal an external users. Internal users include Marketing, IT, and Sales, and all of these user categories have their own different expectations and opinions on how the site should be designed.

While IT wants security, Marketing prefers flexibility, ease of use and the ability to design and add new features, and Sales wants a site that’s captivating to bring them leads. It’s important to go through the process of defining and prioritizing expectations.

As you narrow down the list, you need to determine if the CMS is able to respond to these expectations, as keeping the internal team happy is the first step to launching a successful CMS. When it comes to features, determine what the current CMS supports, features you wish you had but previously had limitations, whether it’s lack of IT resources for customization or lack of familiarity with the CMS’s integration points. You need an extendable platform that can successfully address these feature requests.

In addition, your CMS manages a variety of content, from blog posts to news articles, to products and press. Your CMS needs to be flexible from a content editing standpoint, where non-technical business users have the ability to edit, preview and publish without any additional IT support. Depending on the organization, IT may or may not be involved in the CMS, so it needs to be self-sufficient, with Marketing owning the solution.

Your external users include customers, partners, and other stakeholders, and you need to start thinking about perception and how users view your brand during their site visit.

To manage user expectation, you need consistency across each digital touch point. The experience from desktop to mobile to kiosk should be consistent so that users don’t need to learn a new UI at each touch point. In addition, if you publish a lot of content, users are going to have certain expectations around the frequency of your updates, and the context in which they’re consuming the content from. All of these points warrant discussions when it comes to your CMS process – it needs to be flexible enough to address most of these challenges.

Customer Win Patterns & Success Stories

Customers select their CMS based on a few consistent win patterns – full-featured with the ability to respond, ability to integrate, provides developers with development tools, limited IT overhead so IT resources can be reallocated to other strategic initiatives, fast time-to-market, and ability to consolidate various sites into one platform.

Our customers are leveraging Crafter Cloud to address a variety of business needs, including:

Rebranding a 30 Year Old Company – This health & fitness customer had many inconsistent brands, designs and technologies across their sites that needed to be consolidated into one platform. With a strict timeline and lack of IT resources, they started by deploying their core public facing website onto Crafter Cloud, with other web properties to follow, all accomplished within a two month timeframe.

Creating an identity in Ad Tech – This advertising technology company went through a rebranding to create a new identity. Design was extremely important and they needed a CMS to support pixel perfect design. With Crafter Cloud, their solution was up and running in under 1.5 months.

Enhancing a Global Platform – This customer already had an existing technology platform in place with high user adoption. They wanted to enhance their site with social capability without disruption. Crafter Cloud provided the necessary social features that were implemented with limited platform disruption.

These are just three examples that all come back to the consistent theme of full featured CMS in the cloud, low IT overhead, cost effectiveness, and speed of market.

Creating a Memorable Web Experience

The larger goal is to have your web presence create a memorable experience so that it reinforces your brand. Best practices to accomplish this include the three C’s:

Consistent – Both internally (equipping marketing with necessary tools in one area to create these experiences and providing IT with the right development tools) and externally (across multiple devices)

Contextual – Providing the right content in the right context

Conversational – The ability to create conversations and enable engagement, and ultimately build a community around your web experience

The internet plays a huge influential role in our daily purchasing decisions, most of the time without us even noticing as it’s become so second nature. Whether it’s checking out a restaurant menu before trying it out, checking to see if a product is available at a specific store, or seeing if a business’s solutions can benefit you, a company’s online presence can drastically affect the impression it leaves on a visitor, making it crucial to have a site that delivers an engaging and lasting experience.

In our latest case study published earlier this year, we take a detailed look at how a leading cloud services and communications company is leveraging a Crafter CMS solution to deliver a dynamic, engaging Web experience while increasing site traffic and sales leads.

Rebranding Effort For a Cloud Services and Communications Company Leads to a New Dynamic Website for a Higher Quality Customer Web Experience

As a leading, award-winning cloud and communications services provider, this organization serves as the technology ally for small and mid-sized businesses by delivering services through their private, high-bandwidth enterprise network and data centers. By shifting the technology burden to the provider, they strive to help their customers save valuable time, money and resources.

Customer service excellence has been a big part of this company’s culture since its inception, making it imperative to maintain a cutting edge Web presence. This customer had recently undergone a corporate rebranding initiative, and as part of the effort, had sought to provide a far more dynamic and engaging Web experience for its users. With these objectives in mind, it was quickly realized that there was a need for a new enterprise-class Web Content Management System (CMS) with the robust functionality to effectively address existing needs, along with the flexibility to tackle any ongoing future requirements.

Unlimited Agility Through Open Source Innovation

Led by the Marketing Department, and working in conjunction with the product development groups along with senior executives, this customer wanted to ensure the new website produced the end result they desired. They knew that with any new Web CMS solution, flexibility was a top priority – flexibility of design, using in-house resources, customization, and adapting to ongoing needs.

As an organization that works with a variety of third party vendors for their projects, this customer saw the benefits of open source when it came to flexibility in choosing future development partners when the need arose to grow the Web application with additional components. So they also sought a content management platform that was open, agile and sported a rich feature set. After evaluating a number of potential products, an integrated solution based on Crafter and Alfresco emerged as a clear choice.

Paving the Way to Serve as a Full Fledged Technology Ally for Its Customers

With the new website, this customer has seen an increase in content production and publishing productivity, and are better able to quickly respond and adapt to the data received from analytics. The dynamic content pages provide a proficient way of cataloguing and repurposing content throughout the site. Since re-launching the site using Crafter CMS, overall website traffic has increased by 9 percent while the number of leads generated have more than doubled that amount.

Rivet Logic Announces the Spinoff of Crafter Software

This week Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which will offer commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). Crafter CMS is an award-winning web content and experience management solution that allows organizations to build and manage rich online experiences on the web, mobile, social, and all digital online channels.

“We have seen tremendous commercial demand for Crafter’s modern, open and well-designed solutions in a variety of industries,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic. “With hundreds of sites now in production and interest surging from major organizations around the world, we knew the time was ripe to spinoff a new company entirely focused on continued development and global support of Crafter.”

Crafter Software’s solutions are offered as both a Community Edition under the GNU open source license, and as an Enterprise Edition with a commercial license and global support.

What does this mean for you?

If you are an existing Crafter Rivet user or customer, you will continue to get the great consulting and solution support from Rivet Logic, along with software support from the dedicated team at the new Crafter Software — all from the same team that was supporting you before.

If you are considering Crafter for your next Web content management solution, you now have the extra confidence that Crafter Software has been established to focus on the continued innovation, development and support of Crafter on a global basis.

If you have any interest in a new, modern enterprise Web CMS that was built for the new era of web engagement, check out the new Crafter Software at craftersoftware.com and craftercms.org